Cover Story: Saul Steinberg’s Restless Hands

“Steinberg was so excited, he was like a kid in craft class,” Anton van Dalen, Saul Steinberg’s friend, studio assistant, and fellow-artist, remembers about the period in which “Union Square, 1973,” one of the Table Series featured on this week’s cover, was created. Van Dalen’s voice breaks as the memories of Steinberg flood in,

“He whittled down wooden blocks to make a whole bunch of pens, matchboxes, postcards. He made speech bubbles with quarter-inch wood, geometric shapes, notebooks, all drawn upon and painted with ink and wax crayons. Then he’d glue them to large sheets of wood, making dioramas of his life.”

Joel Smith, the author of “Saul Steinberg: Illuminations” concurs, “Steinberg created so many tables around 1973, they got to be almost like sketchbook pages.” Van Dalen sees that time as one of the most fulfilling of Steinberg’s complex and rich artistic life, “He couldn’t stop making those things. He had restless hands. He, who strived all his life to capture the life of the mind with the most minimal means, couldn’t get enough of the child-like pleasure of making things with his hands.”

A new biography by Deirdre Bair delves into the private life of this famously guarded artist. (Read Peter Schjeldahl’s review of the book.) See below for a few of the eighty-seven New Yorker covers that Steinberg published during his lifetime, and how they derived from his own life.

January 13, 1945. The first published Steinberg cover. After being turned away at Ellis Island and waiting a year in Santo Domingo, the young Romanian-Jewish refugee coming from Italy was finally admitted to the U.S. He enrolled as a G.I. to get U.S. citizenship, and was sent to China as an intelligence officer.

October 12, 1963. Steinberg spoke many languages fluently, including Italian, French, English, and Yiddish, but refused to ever speak his native Romanian after finding refuge in the U.S.

July 5, 1969. “Steinberg uses [numbers] to combine ‘an illusion of reality with an abstraction,’” Bair writes. “Four was a number he particularly liked because it could ‘arouse the curiosity of a cat.’“

January 31, 1970. Steinberg, who had friends and family as well as frequent gallery shows in Europe, flew back and forth often and was therefore part of the “jet-set.” The experience of the intercontinental flight (at a time when it still involved many meal services) is elegantly captured here.

June 8, 1992. “That’s my morning walk” Steinberg said. He explained that he crossed the street “diagonally, never at the crosswalks” so that he could pass by all of the store windows that he liked best.

February 28, 1994. “Looking Down.” As he got older, Steinberg stayed home more often, and like his cat, came to appreciate the view from the windows.

February 13, 1995. “Wilshire & Lex.”Steinberg’s horizon expanded in 1987 with frequent trips to L.A. when his gallery, PaceWildenstein, planned to open a new space there.

January 6, 1977. “2000.” Born with the First War World War, in 1914, Steinberg was in poor health and in even poorer spirits toward the end of his life. In this 1997 cover, he seemed to intuit that he may not get to see the twenty-first century. He died on May 12, 1999, just where he had drawn the noose.